Stephen-Paul Martin:
THE GOTHIC TWILIGHT

Asylum Arts
PO Box 6203
Santa Maria, CA, 93456

92 pp., $8.95

Fiction is often
a series of distorting mirrors in which we see exaggerated
versions of ourselves, and thereby see ourselves in
a fresh way. Stephen-Paul Martin creates fictional
mirrors which reveal self and society. His narrative
is minimal; his prose crackles; progression from one
scene to the next is nonlogical; and old bourgeois
bugaboos like consistent characters are courageously
dispensed with. And the funhouse mirrors of his fiction
show amusing, gruesome pictures which seem to be our
own faces.--Thomas Willoch